International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Triple encryption is a cascade of three block cipher evaluations with independent keys, in order to enlarge its key size. This design is proven secure up to approximately 2^{kappa+min{kappa/2,n/2}} queries (by Bellare and Rogaway, EUROCRYPT 2006, and Ga\\v{z}i and Maurer, ASIACRYPT 2009), where kappa denotes the key size and n the block length of the underlying block cipher. On the other hand, the best known attack requires about 2^{kappa+n/2} queries (by Lucks, FSE 1998, and Ga\\v{z}i, CRYPTO 2013). These bounds are non-tight for kappa